Arcadia Quotes

“They sit here in the darkness, trusting. That the coffee will be hot and unpoisoned. That no raging madman will come in with a gun or bomb.

It leaves him breathless at times, how much faith people put in one another. So fragile, the social contract: we will all stand by the rules, move with care and gentleness, invest in the infrastructure, agree with the penalties of failure. That this man driving his truck down the street won't, on a whim, angle into the plate glass and end things. That the president won't let his hand hover over the red button and, in moment of rage or weakness, explode the world. The invisible tissue of civilization: so thin, so easily rendable. It's a miracle that it exists at all.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“Childhood is such a delicate tissue; what they had done this morning could snag somewhere in the little ones, make a dull, small pain that will circle back again and again, and hurt them in small ways for the rest of their lives.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“He keeps his deepest belief tight to him: that people are good and want to be good, if only you give them a chance.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“Pay attention, he thinks. Not to the grand gesture, but to the passing breath.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“Even when you think you can't bear it, you can bear it.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“How disappointing, when people succumb to what is expected of them.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“Peace, he knows, can be shattered in a million variations: great visions of the end, a rain of ash, a disease on the wind, a blast in the distance, the sun dying like a kerosene lamp clicked off. And in smaller ways: an overheard remark, his daughter’s sour mood, his own body faltering. There’s no use in anticipating the mode. He will wait for the hushed spaces in life, for Ellis’s snore in the dark, for Grete’s stealth kiss, for the warm light inside the gallery, his images on the wall broken beyond beauty into blisters and fragments, returning in the eye to beauty again. The voices of women at night on the street, laughing; he has always loved the voices of women. Pay attention, he thinks. Not to the grand gesture, but to the passing breath.
He sits. He lets the afternoon sink in. The sweetness of the soil rises to him. A squirrel scolds from high in a tree. The city is still far away, full of good people going home. In this moment that blooms and fades as it passes, he is enough, and all is well in the world.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“Poetry is what he turns to these days, finding in its fragmentation the proper echo of the disintegrating world.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“In this moment that blooms and fades as it passes, he is enough, and all is well in the world.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“The stories themselves aren't what moves him now...What moves him are the shadowy people behind the stories, the workers weary from their days, gathering at night in front of a comforting bit of fire...The world then was no less terrifying than it is now, with our nightmares of bombs and disease and technological warfare. Anything held the ability to set of fear...a nail dropped in a the hay, wolves circling at the edge of the woods...”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“If he cannot be infinite - his lov emeeting its eventual exhaustion, his light its shadows - this is the nature of landscapes. The forest meets mountain, the sea the shore. Brain meets bone, meets skin, meets hair; meets air. Day would not be, without night. Every limit, a wise woman once wrote, is a beginning as well as an ending.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“Freedom or community, community or freedom. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“Best to distrust this retrospective radiance: gold dust settles over memory and makes it shine.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“He will miss this quiet full of noise: the nighthawks, the way the woods breathe, the things moving unsuspected through the dark. But he will take with him the canisters full of blasted images and have the pleasure of living them again. They are not nothing, the memories.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“They can wound, stories, they can blister.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“It was the people, the interconnection, everyone relying on everyone else, the closeness. The villages are all dying now, small-town America is dying, and the only place where the same feeling exists now is here, in the city, millions of people all breathing the same air. This, here, now, is more utopia than utopia, more than your pretty little house out in the middle of the forest with only woodchucks for neighbors. Can't you see? All of we kids are here, almost all of the kids from Arcadia, are here in the city. We've gone urban because we're all looking for what we lost. This is the only place that approximates it. The closeness. The connection.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“I'm fine. I'm fine, he says, and fine, fine repeats in his head as he escapes back into the chill. Around him, a spin of bodies in dark coats, tapping thumbs on pads, pressing phones to heads, settling buds into ear canals, projecting an invisible shield of music as they move through the crowd, digital companionship warmer than the bodies around them. Every soul on the street is sunk within its body. Sometimes Bit imagines that he, alone, bears witness to the world.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“If he cannot be infinite - his love meeting its eventual exhaustion, his light its shadow - this is the nature of landscapes. The forest meets mountain, the sea the shore. Brain meets bone, meets skin, meets hair; meets air. Day would not be, without night. Every limit, a wise woman once wrote, is a beginning as well as an ending.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“He thinks of the rotten parachute they played with as kids in Arcadia: they hurtle through life aging unimaginably fast, but each grasps a silken edge of memory that billows between them and softens the long fall.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“Remembering this, he feels the old, hot prickle in his eyes. He thinks, Yes. But it vanishes. His angry heart calls for his attention, a fist on the door of his ribcage, beating.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“No words could possibly contain all he has to say. He manages to utter, at last, I'm okay, and this is enough for now.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“And what hurts him most is the gleam of peace he'd had: he would rather imagine his wife tortured in a secret cell than imagine that she chose to not love them anymore.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“His heart...responds to those once-upon-a-time people, anonymous in the shadows, the faith it took them to come together and rest and listen through the gruesomeness, their patience for the ever after, happy or not.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“...because when you've had a good enough Teacher, you're all your own Leaders.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“The only thing I wanted, she says, was not to be a burden. Quick and painless, how I wanted to go.

But the Universe called you back, Astrid says.

For no reason, Hannah says.

You find the reason, Astrid snaps. Finish with the self-pity, and move on.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“The strong wind rises against the trees so they bend like girls washing their hair.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“He can only bear tragedy if it's abstract.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“If he were more commanding, he would not be a person people would leave.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“The world is sometimes too much for Bit, too full of terror and beauty. Every day he finds himself squeezed under a new astonishment. The universe pulses outward at impossible speeds. Bit feels its spin into nothing.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia